


Light in Your Heart

by Maverick



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:53:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25394929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maverick/pseuds/Maverick
Summary: "History is written by the victors."  -Winston Churchill-Yusuf Al-Kaysani.AKA story time with Joe and Nicky
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 64
Kudos: 633





	Light in Your Heart

**Author's Note:**

> My first story in like 900 years. Many thanks to Pollitt for her most excellent beta, help selecting a title, and indulging in my need to squee about Joe and Nicky at all times, day and night. 
> 
> Title from this Rumi quote: "If light is in your heart, you will find your way home."

Nile took comfort in the irony that life as a mostly-immortal was surprisingly not unlike being a Marine. There was a whole lot of hurry up and wait followed by pops of violence. She missed her old life, her old team, but she awoke each morning with purpose and she could admit that wasn’t always found in the sands of Afghanistan. Oh, she joined the Marines to make her father proud and didn’t regret her decision, but this new life gave her an opportunity to make a difference and she was pretty sure both her parents would be proud of her for that. 

The team settled into a routine much easier than Nile could have imagined. They let her ask endless questions and they regalled her with stories of their pasts which brought history to life in ways she could never imagine. But most importantly, they let her have days where she cried and raged against the life that she lost, a loss as permanent as if she had died. 

Nicky was there with a hot cup of peppermint tea, her favorite cookies, and an endless supply of tissues that Nile would swear he would procure out of thin air, much like a magician. Joe taught her to spar with sticks, offering up his body time and again to her rage, giving only encouragement when she landed a well placed blow. 

And Andy, she was equal parts tender and vicious. She let her mourn, but would not let her succumb to the abyss of her grief. Nile knew that Andy thought she failed Booker in that way and she refused to let Nile suffer the same fate. 

It was apparent the three of them were mourning the loss of Booker. They were resolved in their sentence. A price had to be paid, but she could tell how much of a hole his absence left in their lives both literally and figuratively. A hole they would learn to live with, never expecting Nile to fill it. It was just another way they showed her grace.

They were running their third job since Nile had joined them. They had taken up residence in an opulent Airbnb in an upper scale neighborhood of Prague running reconnaissance on a a businessman who was kidnapping children from orphanages in Pakistan and other countries and selling them into child labor. 

On her new team, Nile thought Nicky to be the most level-headed, the most calm-natured but when he saw the pictures, he punched a hole in the wall in Copley’s office. Joe had to take him out to the garden to calm him down. When they came back in, Nicky had made Andy promise that he got to be the one to kill the man after they had extracted the information they needed to free the children. 

Andy had nodded, cupping her hand on the back of Nicky’s head. “Of course, make sure and do your worst.” 

That was three days ago, and this evening she and Joe were playing cribbage and Andy was on surveillance duty at the window when Nicky walked in, his arms heavy with bags. Joe was up and out of his seat before Nicky had time to close the door. “Someone’s been busy.” He took half of the bags from Nicky. 

Nicky leaned over for a quick kiss. “Picked up the documents and recording equipment Copley sent and did some grocery shopping. It’s nice to have a kitchen.”

Joe scanned the bags clearly looking for something. “That’s all?” Joe asked with a look of disappointment that Nile didn’t understand. 

Nicky shook his head. He set his bags down and pulled a large pastry box out of one of them.

Nile could see that Joe knew exactly what Nicky was holding. He lit up like a kid at Christmas. 

“Couldn’t come to Prague and not get you your medovnik, my love.”

Joe leaned in for another kiss. “As if I needed another reason to love you.” Moving to the kitchen. Joe dropped the bags on the floor and grabbed forks, plates and a very large knife, moving with the same precision he displayed on an Op. 

“Medovnik?” Nile stumbled over the word as Joe set his supplies on the table.

“Medovnik is the best dessert of all time.” Joe looked to Andy to see if she was going to disagree. “The English name is honey cake. It has these thin layers of cake with this caramel honey cream in between them and these crumbs on top. It’s poetry in cake form.”

Nicky and Andy shared a look. It was obvious they've heard this all before but were willing to indulge Joe. 

Joe continued. “You can get it in most of the Baltic states, but I have a soft spot for the ones here in Prague. If ever I needed a last meal, it would be medovnik. I almost envy you, Nile, as you get to try this for the first time.” 

Joe looked through the pass through into the kitchen and met Nicky’s eyes. He then made what Nile would call the classic gimme hands. “Bring it over here, please.”

Nile had never seen Joe this excited about food, or anything really. Well, besides Nicky. 

Nicky shook his head from the kitchen. “I’m going to put the groceries away, Joe. You can wait. In fact, come in here and make us all some coffee.” 

Nile laughed as Joe, honest-to-god pouted, but got up and did what Nicky asked. 

“Boss, I also stopped by Susta Strudl for you.” Nicky held up the box. 

Andy looked over from the window, a smile lighting her eyes. “Poppy seed?”

“Of course! As if I’d get you apple when we’re here in Prague,” Nicky said, returning her smile. “Got the last piece of seasonal plum for you as well.” 

Andy nodded a thank you before turning back to the window. 

“Strudl?” Nile asked, pointing her finger at the box, wondering about the spelling.

“Yes, Strudl, no e,” Nicky said, clearly understanding her question. “The pastry is different from traditional strudel. Czech strudl’s origin is Turkish baklava, which is probably why Andy is a fan. Apple is still the main filling but Susta does poppy seed and seasonal ones like plum.”

Joe came back to the table with a French press. “You want tea Boss, or are you good with coffee?”

“Coffee’s fine. I don’t want to keep you from your medovnik any longer, Joe.” Andy caught Nile’s eyes. “It really is the only thing that he loves that comes close to Nicky.” 

Joe took the knife and cut Nile the first piece of cake. “It comes nowhere near to Nicky, but I do dream about it on occasion.” 

Nicky laughed as Joe handed him the next piece. He set the plate down and picked up some of the strudl before walking it and a cup of coffee over to Andy. 

Andy took a sip of coffee and then set them down and looked over to Joe. “Look at you being all civilized and serving everyone else first. I wasn’t sure you’d even share.” 

“I have manners,” Joe said around a huge bite of cake, clearly contradicting that statement. ”Besides, koho chleba jíš, toho píseň zpívej.”

Both Nicky and Andy laughed. 

“Czech?” Nile asked before she took her first bite of cake, her eyes fluttering shut. “Damn, this is really good.” 

Nicky smiled. “And to answer your question, yes, Joe was speaking Czech. It’s an old Czech proverb which literally translates to ‘whose bread you eat, sing his song’ but the English equivalent would be don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” 

“You all know Czech as well. How many languages do you speak?” 

“Too many,” Andy said from her perch at the window. 

“True,“ Nicky said, saluting Andy with his fork.

Joe answered Nile’s question more directly. “These days? We stick mostly to English and Italian. For the first decade Booker was with us, it was French.” 

Nile could not only see but could feel how talk of Booker hurt, but they didn’t shy away from that collective history. They honored Booker that way. She waited for one of them to continue. They were so in tune with each other, it still wasn’t clear to Nile who would speak when. 

This time it was Nicky. “Joe has an ear for languages. He was a merchant before he was called back to Jerusalem, so he spoke and could write in Greek and Latin along with Arabic. He even had a good grasp of some of the burgeoning Italian and French dialects from the ports he visited, but they weren’t full languages yet. He used the skill to his advantage and did some spying in our ranks.”

Nicky exhaled and Joe picked up the thread of the conversation in the next breath. “The Genoanse were also known for being multilingual. Nicky actually served as a translator between the Byzantines and the Franks”. 

“Franks?” Nile asked, not for the first time realizing her grasp of ancient history was sorely lacking. 

“Our name for the invaders that came to take Jerusalem. Western culture tried to sexy it up centuries later by calling them Crusaders.”

Nile didn’t understand. “Sexy it up?” 

Joe nodded. “La storia viene scritta dai vincitori.”

Nicky turned to Nile. “History is written by the victors. It’s a Winston Churchill quote, but Joe will argue.”

“And he has many, many times,” Andy piped in. 

Nicky laughed and continued. “That Churchill stole the line from him.” 

Joe folded his arms across his chest and sighed. “He did.” 

Nicky patted him on the shoulder and turned to Nile to change the subject. “Arabic took me much longer to learn, it was several decades before I was fluent. Most languages come to me with ease, but not the language of my beloved. It was very frustrating, how I struggled to wrap my tongue around it.”

“But you twisted your tongue around other things with ease, beneamato, “ Joe said with a wink.

“You’re incorrigible,” Nicky said as he stood up and brought the french press over to Andy to refill her coffee cup.

Nile would agree with that, but Nicky could be just as bad. She’d only been with them a few months, but it was clear Joe and Nicky were incapable of not flirting with each other even after a millennia.

Which brought up another point she always wondered about. Nile turned to Joe. “How did you know,” she paused to rephrase. “What made you stop being enemies?

Joe looked across the room at Nicky, his eyes intense, but when he spoke, his words were just barely more than a whisper. “He saved a boy, no more than ten years old. A boy wielding a sword much too big for him, set out to avenge the death of his father at the hand of the Franks. Nicolo stood between this boy and his own brother-in-arms. He shielded him with his body and took the deathblow meant for that child.”

Nicky walked back over, setting the press on the table. Once done, he moved to stand behind Joe, his hands resting on his shoulders. He looked over at Nile. “We’d interacted a bit by this point, the whole not staying dead thing making us forge an awkward alliance. We came to an understanding that when a battle was over, we’d work together to honor the dead on both sides. Then we would retreat to our own camps and wait for it to start all over again”. 

Nile smiled at them both. “So the boy?”

Joe picked up the thread again. “With his dying breath, Nicky begged me to get the boy to safety.” Joe placed his hand over Nicky’s on his shoulder, looking up at his love. “We had died and come back a few times at this point, but I knew in that moment, he would have done the same even without the likelihood that he would wake up again. I have never seen such pure goodness on display. It was a revelation like no other.”

Nicky bent and kissed Joe’s forehead before sliding into the chair next to him. 

“Did you save the boy?” Nile asked. 

Joe nodded. “I did. Even then I could not refuse Nicky anything.”

Nile had seen that several times already. “So you stopped fighting each other then?”

Nicky snorted, a smile lighting his eyes. “No. I had lost the taste for sure, but he would still seek me out to kill me.” He paused and licked his lips. “Several more times.”

“What? “ Nile looked between the both of them. She didn’t understand.

The two of them had a whole conversation with just their eyes before Nicky answered. “He wanted to be the one to do it, so he could make sure it was as painless as possible and to ensure I received Last Rites. More times than I can count I died in Joe’s arms with him reciting the prayers of my people in Latin as he anointed my forehead with myrrh.”

Nile looked at Joe. “Last Rites?” Even though you knew he couldn’t die?”

Joe reached over and cupped the side of Nicky’s face, his thumb ghosting across Nicky’s forehead. “I didn’t know. Not then, not really. I had watched him perform the ritual on his dying comrades after each battle, so I knew it was important. I would kill him in the name of my God, but I could not banish him to the hell of his if death chose to take him.” 

Nicky brought Joe’s hand to his mouth and kissed his palm. He smiled, a look in his eye that Nile could only call reverent. “I’d been a priest and witnessed and performed many benedictions, but I have never felt the grace of God as much as when Joe did his best to ensure my salvation. Time and again.”

“Fuck,” Nile said at the sheer weight of Nicky’s words. 

Nicky winked at Joe, then turned to Nile, his smile now wide and free. “No, that came much later.”

“And it just kept coming,” Joe laughed and leered at Nicky. 

Nile chose to ignore the innuendo. But in for a penny, in for a pound. She turned to look at Nicky. “Why did it take time? Because you were a priest? Or because Joe was a man?”

Nicky closed his eyes clearly lost in a memory. “We fell into a routine as the Franks moved closer to Jerusalem. These skirmishes would take place outside the city walls. We’d wake up surrounded by our dead brethren and work together to move the bodies and tend to any survivors. We’d talk about our lives, debate our beliefs, share bread and water, and occasionally wine. One night, Joe shared a drawing he'd done of me from his dreams. He even gifted me with Medjool dates.”

“I was already trying to woo him,” Joe interjected. 

Nicky smiled and continued. “That night we talked about how tired we were, how the battles seemed both endless and pointless, that all the blood spilled on that ground in the name of God changed nothing. We talked about our immortality and what we thought it could mean. We talked through the night into the rising sun. And we made a pact that after the last battle, when a winner was declared, we would leave Jerusalem together.”

“Decision made,” Joe continued. “We stood face-to-face and clasped our hands together. We let our foreheads touch as the sun rose in the distance.” 

Damn, Nile thought. She should have known it would be some sort of epic romantic shit. 

Nicky continued. “But in all honesty, the decision was made several days before when I realized what Joe meant to me. So no, my crisis of faith was never over loving a man,” Nicky tilted his head in contemplation, a smile ghosting his lips again. “Well, I guess half of it was--but not for the reason you think. My crisis was one day, I looked across the battlefield at him.” He met Joe’s eyes and held his gaze. “And realized I loved him more than I loved God. I no longer wanted to die for the cross. I no longer wanted to kill the infidel. I simply wanted to live for Yusuf Al-Kaysani.”

“And you call me the incurable romantic,” Joe said, pressing his lips to Nicky’s in a kiss that was equal parts sacred and profane. 

They rested their foreheads against each other and just breathed, probably much like that first night. Nile felt her cheeks heat up. She had to look away. She met Andy’s eyes across the room. “Are they always like this?”

Andy snorted. “No, they used to be so much worse.”

Nicky laughed as he ran his lips across Joe’s jaw before pulling away. “Yes, be glad you weren’t around during the 18th century.”

Joe pouted and Nicky leaned over to kiss that pout off his lips. 

Nile just waited. 

“Joe took to romanticism like, what the expression, a duck takes to water. He wrote and recited a poem to me nearly every day for a decade.”

Joe shrugged his shoulders. He was not ashamed. “How could I not?”

“Because both Nicky and I begged you not to,” Andy said. She shut the blinds and walked over to the table. She grabbed another piece of strudl. “They’re in for the night. We’ll pick up in the morning. Nicky, you take first watch. And Joe, there are only so many times a person can listen to you describing Nicky’s eyes before someone wants to stab you.” 

Nile could see from Andy’s expression that that someone was her. 

Nicky laughed. “It’s true. Wordsworth had nothing on the love of my life, but it was a lot.” 

“I will not apologize,” Joe said. “It’s been over 900 years and I have still not been able to truly capture the beauty of Nicolo’s eyes either with words or pictures. Nei tuoi occhi c’è il cielo.”

“Grazie infinite”

Nile closed her eyes and translated the words. “The sky is in your eyes?”

Joe nodded. “Good.”

They had been giving her lessons in Italian. She was glad she was starting to pick things up. 

Joe continued, “It does mean that, yes, but it’s also how you say heaven is in your eyes. And that is what I mean when I’m talking about Nicky.” 

Andy stood up and popped her neck. “I’m heading to bed. I’ll see you all in the morning. Thanks again for the strudl, Nicky.” 

“Prego”

“Sleep well boss,” Joe said. He reached over to grab the rest of Nicky’s piece of cake, which Nicky surrendered with a smile.

“Night,” Nile said as Andy walked down the hallway. She kicked her legs out, putting them up on the chair that Andy had vacated. She thought back to something Nicky had said. “What was the other half?”

Nicky nodded. She could tell he was proud that she analyzed and remembered his words. The look between Joe and Nicky quickly turned from playful to grim. Nicky had the look of someone still angry, even after 900 years. 

“The Franks took Jerusalem and instead of showing the mercy and grace of God, they went about slaughtering everyone in the city including women and children,” Nicky said, his jaw clenching. “They killed Joe as he shielded a child no more than three. Muslums, Jews -- they didn’t care. The streets ran red with blood. But what burned out the final embers of my faith, what haunted me in nightmares for years to come, was the abject glee on their faces. That look was not to honor God, it was to celebrate the cruelty of man.” 

Joe reached out and threaded his fingers with Nicky’s. 

Nile could see how that simple action grounded Nicky in the here and now.”What did you do?” she asked. 

Nicky met her eyes. “We were able to round up a couple dozen people and we liberated them.” 

“He means we slaughtered any and all Franks in our way as we fled from within the city walls.” He brought Nicky’s hand to his mouth and kissed his knuckles.”We showed them the same mercy they had shown the people of Jerusalem.” 

“Where did you go?” 

“We walked them to a small village that was located in what is now Jordan,” Calm now, Nicky removed his hand from Joe’s and began to gather up the cake dishes. “We helped them acclimate to their new life. Joe went out to trade and barter to get them supplies and to look for other survivors. He’d be gone for weeks at a time.”

Joe picked up the thread as Nicky took the plates to the kitchen. “Nicky stayed behind to provide protection. He didn’t speak the language yet, but the women trusted him and the children adored him.” 

Nicky smiled as he walked back over. “Joe would come back from his trips with little gifts for me and sweets for the children.”

“I was still wooing him,” Joe said as Nicky sat back down.

“What did he bring you?” Nile asked

“Many food gifts: pistachios, lemons, olives, dates, dried meats and olive oil. He’d give me drawings he had done while he was away. His most extravagant gift was a small ornate knife made from Damascus steel. I still have that blade.”

Joe looked up almost shyly. “Everyone needs a good knife. You can’t go around bludgeoning people with swords that weigh 30 pounds. It’s just not practical.” 

Nicky rolled his eyes at what was obviously an old argument. He turned to Nile, a smile lighting his face. “And if there is anything you’ve learned in these last months about Joe is he’s all about practicality.” 

Nile laughed. “What were you doing to woo him back?”

It was Joe’s turn to smile. “He learned to make pita.” 

Nicky met his eyes. “I did not learn that for you.” 

Joe looked back intensely. “Yes, he did. He’d meet me at the edge of camp with warm pita and a smile whenever I would return.” 

“I was simply happy to have someone near who could understand me. You just always showed up right after I finished making the pita. It wasn’t for you.” 

Nile looked from one to another. “You both are ridiculous. I’m gonna leave story time here for now. Thanks for sharing.” 

They all stood up.

“Thanks for listening,” Nicky said. “It’s good for us to tell these stories.” 

“So you don’t forget them?” Nile asked, putting her hands on each of their shoulders. 

Joe shook his head. “No, so they live on after we’re gone.” 

Nile pulled them in for a three-way hug. “Fuck that shit. I’m gonna need at least a few more centuries before I’m up to speed. Besides, ‘la storia viene scritta dai vincitori.”” 

Nicky chuckled and squeezed her shoulder. “Good pronunciation. We’ll do our best to be there, Nile,” Nicky said with a cupped hand at the back of her head. “Get some sleep. We’ll see you in the morning.” 

As they walked away, Nile could hear them bickering about pita bread and she couldn’t help the smile that crept on her face. She knew Booker had been jealous of what Joe and Nicky had, but that wasn’t the case for her. If they could survive--no, thrive-- over 900 years, there was still good in this world. Maybe tomorrow she’d ask Joe to recite one of those poems. Love should be celebrated, even if it might invoke the wrath of Andy. It’d be okay. Nile was pretty sure she could take whatever her new family could dish out.

On that note, she wondered if Joe would notice if she ate another piece of his cake.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I wrote my two favorite desserts from Prague into this story. If every I had a last meal it would be medovnik just like Joe.


End file.
